Archiving Options

[Ray Thornback]

Note: I’m not saying tape will last 100 years or anything, just that when compared to a DVD-R, tape is a far better archive format.

[Michael Moser]

I think that what it comes down to is comfort level with whatever system one uses.
Walter’s system seems like a good one. Generally I don’t access material as often once it’s stored, but the idea of doing a double backup mitigates any problems with one large drive/archive. We’ll have to see if any solution is still around in 100 years…or 10 years more realistically.

[Russell Lasson]

LTO is really an industry standard. If you can afford it, then using LTO-4A is really nice. The Cache-A products have some really great features.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Colorist/Digital Cinema Specialist
Color Mill
Salt Lake City, UT
http://www.colormill.net

[Chris Linke]

We recently bought a Quantum A-Series LTO-3 drive, and it is outstanding. I did all the research you’re doing, and listened to a lot of folks, and this was simply a better, safer solution than hard drives (who hasn’t had one fail?) or optical media such as DVD-R or BD-R (too vulnerable).

The drive is a standalone unit that connects directly to our network via an ethernet cable. It has a built in FTP server, so you access it via an FTP program and drag and drop the files onto it.

The unit is a bit pricey, but the 400 GB cartridges are only about $35. That’s pretty cheap, so we keep two copies of each backup tape. Being an almost completely tapeless shop, being able to backup huge amounts of data quickly and easily is extremely valuable.

Chris Linke
PRC Digital Media
http://www.prcdigital.com

[Michael Moser]

Thanks for the info.
I’d heard that that solution is a high initial investment, but cheaper down the line.

Interestingly in my informal survey, people are doing all sorts of things. I spoke to the librarian/archivist at the National Press Club today who mentioned off-site storage; that is renting space on a server at Amazon or .mac. in addition to backing up locally. In that case the storage provider is responsible for keeping the storage protocols up to date.

One has to remember to keep the machines/software around to playback the material and migrate it as the media protocols change. (She still has her Betamax and lends it out to friends who need to re-digitize material).

[Chris Borjis]

[walter biscardi] “We don’t archive just one project on a drive, we archive stuff until it fills up so all the drives get used at least once per month until they’re full and then we’ll be accessing them on a regular basis to pull media off of them so they’ll get used.”

Thats the same as i do here. I purchase 500GB drives, fill them till about 60gb is free, then start a new one. works great.

Drive bearings are a lot less likely to seize than a controller board going bad and those can be replaced.

For ultra-mission-critical we archive to a mirrored 1TB drive.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I too use hard disks like Walter. And I use a drive dock like someone pointed out. The kind in which you can pop a drive in from the top. It connects to my MacPro with a Sonnet eSATA card, and to my MacBook Pro with a Sonnet ExpressCard eSATA adapter. There’s a post on that in my blog.

But of late I’ve had a series of drive failures with Seagate 7200.11 SATA drives, mainly 1 Tb. And if your backup has client projects especially pertaining to unreleased features, you can’t even send in the drive under warranty.

But SATA drives in a dock are mighty convenient. And fast. You can do up to 3 GB/min or more.
If the data is very precious, consider backing up to two drives, of different brands.

SATA drives can fail, but the data on them is often safe and a recovery house can get it all back.

We use LTOs for larger film projects where data runs into Terabytes. If you want a small solution get a Quantum or HP drive and get BRU software. I’ve heard its fast and has good Mac support.

Paradoxically, with film projects one is safer than with P2/Red/XDCam projects. If all else fails, the film will always be there.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India